To Participate or Not to Participate: The Link Between Survey Participation, Electoral Participation, and Political Interest

Survey participation, electoral participation, and politicalinterest have been given wide attention in the research literature,but no one so far has combined these three variables in onemodel. Taking the social isolation-hypothesis as our startingpoint, we developed a model with one factor, social involvement,as the common factor underlying these three types of participation.We reviewed the literature and concluded that we had to includea second underlying factor: attachment to society. Using a newdata set, gathered on the occasion of the 1998 Dutch nationalelections and including validated voter turnout measures, wewere able to test the model. After making some adaptions, wefound a model with a satisfactory fit. The results show that,by including social involvement and attachment to society asmediating variables, we can reach much higher levels of explainedvariances of survey and electoral participation than we canwith traditional models. The results also add to our understandingof the relationship between survey and electoral participationand political interest.     

A positive model of tax reform

This paper is devoted to the explanation of tax policy from a behavioural-theoretic point of view. It, for the first time, brings together within a unified framework behavioural determinants of government expenditure, taxation, and tax reform. Administrative and compliance costs associated with taxation (factors generally neglected in models of taxation), as well as tax avoidance/evasion, deadweight losses, and the costs that are involved in the tax reform process itself, play a crucial role in the model. The paper investigates how these factors influence the development of taxation and expenditure, and the occurrence of tax reform.This paper has been presented at the Congress of the European Public Choice Society, Linz (Austria), 1989. The authors would like to thank Jos de Beus, Kees Goudswaard, Hans de Groot and Jean-Dominique Lafay for their useful comments. This paper is based on our Dutch publication Belastinghervorming en politieke economie, in Belastingheffing en belastinghervorming, pp. 179–211. Preadviezen Koninklijke Vereniging voor de Staathuishoudkunde 1988. Leiden/Antwerpen: Stenfert Kroese.     

Emissions trading for households? A behavioral law and economics perspective

This is the first research article on expanding emissions trading in the EU to households in which law and economics is explicitly and systematically combined with behavioral science. The goal of the article is neither to plead in favor nor against emissions trading for households, but rather to provide an analysis of such a scheme. To that end, the article gathers relevant theoretical insights and discusses how established empirical findings can be used to design a potentially workable scheme. The analysis not only presents an overview of possible economic and behavioral barriers, but also creates a feedback to its institutional design by presenting possible solutions to overcome them. Downstream allocation creates a more direct and visible carbon incentive, whereas administrative costs can be reduced by concentrating monitoring and enforcement upstream. Behavioral acceptance can be boosted via strategic communication, for instance by stressing that emissions trading is both effective (emissions are capped) and fair (those who emit less, pay less). Energy conservation can be stimulated by frequently sending updates to households of their carbon transactions to make the consequences of their behavior more noticeable. Whether these necessary conditions are also sufficient to ensure political acceptance remains an open question.     

Land tenure,land law and development: some thoughts on recent debates

This paper offers a discussion of some of the features of recent land tenure debates and policies. It argues that two different orientations can be discerned: one that tends to regard land primarily as an economic asset and another that rather takes a (human) rights orientation and emphasises food and shelter security. These different orientations can be seen to be related to contrasting conceptualisations of extra-legality and different ranges of policy options when it comes to the legalisation or formalisation of land tenure and the acknowledgement of arrangements alternative to Western style individual ownership.     

Land tenure legislation in a pluri-cultural and multi-ethnic Society: The case of Bolivia

After considering notions of social justice as they are related to concepts of ‘development’, this article seeks to provide a regionally differentiated overview of the evolution of land tenure in Bolivia and the way arrangements for land tenure legalization have been contested and negotiated over time. It will show how the colonial ‘reciprocity pact’, which entailed recognition of indigenous tenure systems came under attack from liberalizing policies during the second half of the nineteenth century. The 1953 agrarian reform brought new arrangements and new agrarian policies that formally aimed at modernization. Yet another reform, in 1996, under the aegis of neoliberalism, brought a formal recognition of indigenous tenure systems which, however, has not yielded very satisfactory outcomes. This is due to a one-sided emphasis on tenure that disregards broader community organization and a slow and biased implementation favouring the traditionally dominant sectors.     

The agrarian question in Peru: Some observations on the roads of capital

Under the military governments of Velasco (1968–75) and Morales Bermùdez (1975–80) one of the most important agrarian reforms of South American history took place in Peru. According to Alain de Janvry [1981] this reform involved a shift from a junker‐road to a farmer‐road toward the development of capitalism in Peruvian agriculture. In the first part of this study de Janvry's approach to the ‘agrarian question’ and his evaluation of the Peruvian reform will be discussed. It will be argued that he overestimates the importance of farmer‐type capitalism and pays too little attention to the cooperatives established during the reform. Focusing the discussion on the co‐operatives in the coastal region it will be argued that these enterprises can be understood, to an important extent, as a form of simple commodity production. In the final part of the article a case study of the cotton producing co‐operatives in the province of Ica will be presented.